![]() We had all been influenced by, and at one time had loved, a fundamentalist movie that had been popular in the mid 1970s, called “Thief in the Night.” This was obviously many, many years before the “Left Behind” books and films, but the movie was a kind of earlier incarnation of all that. ![]() The conversation took on a specific topic. (Included in the group were two people who were to go on and also to be publishing academics, one a philosopher and another a historian.)Īs we talked we eventually got around to our former ideas that there would be a rapture. And as happens in groups like that, we all started telling stories about our fundamentalist pasts, having a lot of very good laughs about how we used to be. One of them invited us over for a pool party she and her husband were house sitting at a gorgeous place off in the country outside of town, where they had a very nice pool, tennis court, and other niceties. I had a bunch of intellectual Christian friends in Princeton at the time (I was working on my Masters degree), and all of us had come up through fundamentalist circles. It was a passage meant to inspire hope, not a passage that was meant literally as a indicating a calendrical event that was to occur sometime next Thursday. This world may be a cesspool of misery and suffering now, but God will overcome all that is evil and will repay all who do it, and he will reward his faithful, somehow or other. ![]() The passage is ultimately about how God is sovereign. Still, not all of it could be taken as literally true.Īt that point I had come to realize that the whole idea of a “Rapture” in which the dead would rise to meet God and then the living believers in Jesus would be taken up to meet them all in the clouds was a metaphorical description of how in the final analysis, however the end comes, God will make right all that is wrong in this world. It wasn’t the only way God spoke to people, but it certainly was one way, and a cherished way. I had already come to see that parts of it contradicted one another, that there were historical implausibilities, and mistakes of various kinds.įor me at that stage, the Bible was not so much the words God had given his human authors as it was a book that was written with real religious insight by special authors whose words were a medium through which God could deliver his message to humans. I still thought that in *some* sense it was the Word of God, but I did not think that it was infallible or true in every way. I was becoming socially quite liberal, and was starting to take a more liberal view of the Bible. The church I was attending was evangelical, but I was moving away from a conservative theology and its strict, literal interpretation of the Bible. It’s a pretty funny story.Īt the time I was still a church going Christian. Discussing the mythology found in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 has made me remember something that happened some 35 years ago.
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